


where the water meets the sky

by purple01_prose



Category: Epic (2013)
Genre: Beaches, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Ocean, Prompt Fic, Unresolved Sexual Tension, not a lot of angst though, overuse of the word 'adorable'
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-20
Updated: 2013-06-20
Packaged: 2017-12-15 15:27:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,595
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/851115
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/purple01_prose/pseuds/purple01_prose
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>MK loves the ocean and the beach. Nod discovers this by accident.</p>
            </blockquote>





	where the water meets the sky

MK keeps pictures of the ocean in her room.

 

She has shells, shark’s teeth, and sand dollars hidden away in a drawer. They’re things she got with her mom, and she doesn’t want to be reminded of the memories right now. One day, she’ll open the drawer, blow away the dust and relive her memories, but for right now, she keeps them locked away.

 

She misses the stark blues and yellows of the ocean in a place covered with lush greens, white, and yellows of the forest. The air smells clean, but it doesn’t have the bite that comes with salt. The river has a current, but it can’t knock her off her feet when she wades into it.

 

There are no starfish. She can’t expect to see whales and porpoises if she sits on the sand and waits.

 

“Where’s this?” Nod asks her once, on a late-night foray into her room. He’s sneaked past Ronin _and_ her dad, and given that her dad has Decided Opinions on Boys In Her Room Late At Night, boy’s determined. He’s peering at a picture of the ocean, water stretching until it joins with the sky. It’s one of MK’s favorites.

 

“I don’t know,” she shrugs, standing up to join him. He climbs up her robe sleeve to sit on her shoulder. “It’s just a poster my mom got for my sixteenth birthday.”

 

“And that?” Nod points to a picture of her and her mom, red as lobsters, beaming at the camera. In the background is sand, and _way_ off is the glitter of ocean.

 

“That’s my mom and me at Jones Beach,” MK can feel herself smiling. She lets it stay. “It’s this beach that she and I would visit at least five times during summer break. The undertow—current—is tremendous, and the water’s cold, but since you have to walk over what feels like a mile of sand, you’re totally ready for cold water. It was one of our favorite places.”

 

Nod places a hand on her chin. When she looks at him, his brow is furrowed. “Where is your mom? You never told me.”

 

“She died,” MK says softly. “Couple of months ago.”

 

Nod’s eyes widen, and he looks at a loss. If she was his size, he’d probably offer her a hug, but hugging her cheek, while adorable, doesn’t quite have the same effect.

 

“I’m working through it,” MK tells him, trying to forestall the whole ‘I’m sorry’ thing.

 

“Alone?”

 

“Well, yeah. My dad isn’t so great at this kind of thing, and we’ve talked about it exactly once, and that was when I returned from my adventure,” MK turns away from the picture of her and her mom, looking at her dolphin and whale calendar.

 

Nod places his hand back on her cheek. “MK, that isn’t...healthy. Grief is—complicated.”

 

“Have you talked about your grief about your dad to anyone?” she counters. Her tone isn’t mean, but from the way they’ve talked about his dad (again, exactly once), he doesn’t seem like he talks about it either.

 

Nod, however, sees right through her deflection. “Yeah, actually, I have. With my mom, with Finn, one of my commanding officers, and I’ve talked about it with Ronin when neither of are mad at each other.” He looks up at her. “You’ve talked about with me, but with no one else, right?”

 

“I don’t need help,” she snaps.

 

Nod holds up his hands. “Okay. So, is all of this water good for something?”

 

It’s a pretty terrible transition, but she lets it go. “Yeah, oceans have some of the biggest biodiversity on the planet. We know more about the moon than the contents of the oceans.”

 

Nod’s brow furrows. “What?”

 

Oh right, advanced society of tiny people who live in the woods—and don’t have access to Stomper history books. “In 1969—ah, several decades ago, we sent up astronauts—space explorers—into space and to the moon. Since then, we’ve explored the moon pretty thoroughly.”

 

Nod looks gobsmacked. “What—but--.”

 

“Breathe,” MK instructs, sitting down and offering her palm to him. He jumps into it, staring up at her.

 

“How did Stompers manage that? I mean, you’re so big, and du— _slow_ , definitely slow.”

 

“You perceive us as slow,” she explains, holding in her giggles. “To us you move really quickly. Without the helmet, you’d be a blur to me,” she taps it. “But to us—we look normal. Speak normal and everything.”

 

“So you mean when Stompers speak to each other, you think you sound like us?” Nod looks fascinated. “So that’s how you build all of those things?”

 

MK nods.

 

“Wow,” Nod says in wonder. “So you love the ocean—that huge water reservoir.”

 

“Well, it’s not quite a reservoir,” she laughs. “But yeah, I love the ocean. Haven’t been there since before my mom got sick, but good luck prying my dad away from the forest.”

 

“What makes the ocean different from the water here, apart from size?”

 

“It’s salt water,” MK explains.

 

“How does _that_ enable growth? Salt destroys the land.”

 

“The animals and plants that live in the ocean have adapted to it.”

 

“Huh.” Nod jumps off her hand, onto her desk. “I have to go before Ronin checks the barracks. Tomorrow?”

 

“Tomorrow,” she agrees, watching him bounce around the room until he stops at her window. He blows her a kiss—she giggles—and he’s gone.

 

\--

 

Honestly, she thinks that’s the end of it. Her mementos stay buried in their drawer, her bathing suit gets drawn out to go swimming in the river at moonrise (apparently that’s when the Leaf-Men go swimming, which is both adorable and questionable), and river water is _cold_ , because it flows directly from the Taconics, but hey, she can manage. For a little bit.

 

She’s wrapped her, well, wrap around her and toweling her hair dry when Nod jumps onto her shoulder. “Is this as good as the beach?”

 

“No, no good waves,” she smiles, looking out at the small splashes of the various Leaf-Men. Ronin’s watching them swim—oh, maybe this is survival training. Then why was she invited? “I like to bodysurf. You swim in the waves, and then you can still feel it when you go to bed at night.”

 

Nod looks confused. “But you can do that in a river.”

 

Must be a size thing. “Beaches...are different,” she says, offering a small smile. She glances at her watch. “I should get home, before my dad comes hurtling through here. Since our little adventure, little here being snarky and not a comment on you at all, he’s terrified if I go longer than a few hours out of his line of sight.”

 

“Yeah,” Nod agrees, “I get that. I don’t want you too far from my line of sight either.” When she tilts her head aside, blushing, he presses a kiss behind her ear, jumping off when Ronin looks about to bellow.

 

Boy is _smooth_.

 

\--

 

And that’s how it starts, really—Nod slowly gets her to give up why she loves the beach and the ocean in small, incremental bits, and he’s so subtle about it she doesn’t put it together until one night, when she leaves a sandwich at her dad’s elbow (he’ll forget to eat if he doesn’t actively think about it), he looks up at her, taking off his glasses. “Do you want to go to the beach?”

 

She blinks at him. “What?”

 

“I mean, you and the boy talk about it all the time,” he gestures to the computers, “and I was curious.”

 

“Well, it would be nice,” she hedges.

 

“Is there a good day next week? As long as we’re back by dark, I can’t see why we can’t take him with us.”

 

“You’re okay with me bringing a boy,” she says slowly, repeating it to make sure her dad knows what he’s saying.

 

“Well yeah,” Dad shrugs, “and he’s two inches tall. How much trouble can the two of you get in?”

 

She looks away. She will _not_ be answering that.

 

She works it out with Nod (apparently Ronin belongs to her father’s camp, that there’s such a difference in their sizes they can’t get up to much, and wow, that’s kind of embarrassing), and the following Thursday, her dad fills up his battered green Honda with gas, and she packs up the car with plenty of towels, food (complete with Nod-sized food), and shampoo and fresh changes of clothing.

 

They’re going to Robert Moses State Park. They live about half an hour north of Poughkeepsie, so it’ll be about two hours to the beach. MK warns Nod about this, but he shrugs it off. “Two hours where you and I can actually talk without overbearing father figures? I’m in.”

 

The drive _to_ the beach is awkward, because her dad was intent on questioning Nod (he didn’t go so far as to say, “What are your intentions on my daughter’s virtue?” which, thanks dad, but don’t actually need you to defend something I don’t have any more—ex-boyfriend in high school was _really_ good), but the definite message is that her dad isn’t impressed by Nod.

 

Nod, thankfully, is more amused than anything else.

 

“I think he thinks that since he wasn’t there for the longest time, he has to make up for it by being a hardass now,” she tells Nod in a whisper.

 

Nod tucks himself into the curve of her neck. It’s a tiny pocket of warmth, and she lov—likes it. She likes it “He’s just protective.”

 

She grunts. “Whatever.”

 

Whatever Nod has to say on the subject dies when they turn a corner and suddenly he sees sparkling blue, and he scrambles out of the hollow of MK’s neck to stand on MK’s arm, staring out the window. “ _That’s_ the ocean?”

 

“Yeah,” MK says.

 

Nod looks back at her, and his eyes are huge with something that looks like fear, and she realizes that as much as the ocean can be overwhelming to her, it must be even more than that to Nod. You know. 2-inch-tall issue.

 

“You know, I wonder sometimes if there are Jinn in the ocean,” MK remarks, to distract him. “I mean, if you all are in the forest--.”

 

“It’s possible, but we don’t really hear about others like us except the survivors of Stomper purges.”

 

“Purges?” her dad asks.

 

“When Stompers destroy a forest, Jinn die,” Nod explains, turning to her dad, “there are always a few survivors who go looking for a new home, but they don’t live very long after that. We’ve heard the stories from the odd survivor who made it to us, and that just reinforces the necessity to protect ourselves.”

 

“I’m sorry,” MK says softly.

 

“We keep to ourselves,” Nod says, turning back to the ocean. “That’s—amazing.”

 

“Yeah, it is,” MK sighs, laying her head on her arm as she looks out the window. In another turn, the ocean disappears, but she and Nod stay like that, hungry for the next glance.

 

Finding a parking space isn’t too difficult (at least not by the standards MK has held unofficially since the first time she and her mom went to Jones Beach after her mom got a car, and they searched for a parking space for an _hour_ ). They collect their gear, Nod hiding behind MK’s curtain of hair. He fully enjoys it, running his fingertips through her hair.

 

She’s sensitive there. When she hisses, “Quit it,” he laughs against the nape of her neck and continues.

 

He does it all the way through their walk down the beach and setting up their gear. Her dad seems oblivious as he slathers himself with sunscreen, so she presses her lips together, and blames the heat in her cheeks on the sun.

 

Nod won’t _stop laughing_ , so she plunges into the ocean to retaliate. His grip on her hair turns so strong it hurts, and when she surfaces, he moves around to her shoulder to glare at her. “What was that for?”

 

“Quit teasing,” she retorts.

 

Nod pouts. He doesn’t stray far from her—the waves are so big that he could easily become lost, something she didn’t realize until they’re actually at the beach, and she feels guilty about it. Nod doesn’t seem to mind, diving off her shoulder into the water, before climbing back up her arm to do it again.

 

It’s adorable.

 

“I see what you mean about the waves,” Nod tells her later as she sprawls out on a towel, letting the wind dry her. She brushes away the salt every so often, because salt residue is gross. “They really are stronger here.”

 

“’Cause of the tides,” she answers. “The moon exerts its pull, and waves happen.”

 

“Right,” Nod says in that tone of, ‘I don’t actually know what you mean but I’ll take your word for it.’

 

She’s adept at using that tone herself.

 

The sun is starting to go down, and that means they need to go, so she gets up and starts to put stuff away. Her dad had wandered off to search for tide pools (take the scientist out to the beach, but can’t get the beach...that was going somewhere), but he’s starting to come back now, clearly excited. “Here we go,” she mutters to Nod, whom she only sees as a blur (because they obviously left the helmets at home).

 

“MK! You’ll never believe what I found!”

 

“Something amazing?”

 

“A Northern Sea Star—only this one’s _eggplant_!”

 

“That’s great Dad, but you should put it back.”

 

“Oh, do we need to go?”

 

“Yeah, Dad.”

 

“All right.”

 

“He’s so excited about everything,” Nod says in her ear as she finishes up packing the towels and food. The trash gets put into one bag, and it’ll be disposed of in one of the big garbage pails near the parking lot. “How does he maintain that?”

 

“I guess he never grew up.”

 

“Wow,” Nod laughs, stepping carefully on her shoulders. They’ve already started to turn red—no matter how much sunscreen she puts on, she _always_ get sunburned. She can put on aloe once they get home.

 

On the drive back, she volunteers to drive, since her dad’s tired. He falls asleep almost immediately, and Nod perches on the armrest, staying out of her way while she drives. “I had fun today,” he tells her conspiratorially. He’s not sunburned, but that might be because he pretty much hung out in her hair all day.

 

“Good,” she says, focusing on moving on to the right exit to get onto the Taconic. Once she does that, it’s a straight shot to home. “I love the whole experience, even if it means I get sunburned.” She glances down at her shoulders. She’ll get a tan line along the halter of her bathing suit top, but hopefully the sunburn’s not too serious. She hates peeling.

 

“What do you do for that?”

 

“Aloe, mostly. I’ve got it at home. Are you going to need to leave as soon as we park?”

 

“Yeah.”

 

“Okay then.” MK watches the road, but out of the corner of her eye she sees Nod crawl onto her lap, and the wrap creates a kind of hammock between her spread thighs. He curls up there, and promptly goes to sleep.

 

Lucky them, she grouses as she switches on her headlights. Dad’s asleep, and now Nod...but she glances down at her lap again, and fondness twitches her lips into a small smile. Maybe they can do this again sometime. That would be fun. 

**Author's Note:**

> Another prompt fic, but I should warn you--I don't actually like the beach. Well, not Gulf of Mexico beach. BORING. I'm thinking about doing DVD commentary for this one, but I haven't figured out where to post it yet. 
> 
> Enjoy!


End file.
